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[Robsoie]

Finally completed the 2nd game of the Tomb Raider reboot serie, "Rise of the Tomb Raider" and it was quite good, though unfortunately the story wasn't always great in its pacing (i think it's a problem when you have figured out the supposed big reveal a few hours before the main character that seemed to be completely oblivious to the obvious clues).  But overall it's a great game.

But still the first one of that serie (the 2013 "Tomb Raider") remains my favorite, i have difficulties to pinpoint exactly why, maybe the sense of urgency and pressure that seemed to be constant and was keeping me on my toes everytime, while in Rise of the TR there were much more "relaxed" moments.

The only low point to me is the change in the character design, while "useless Jonah" is visually a completely different character than in the 1st game, Lara herself rework of the face (and especially eyes) was for the worst : nearly everytime she had a different emotion, it always ended in her eyes opening big in a "bewildered" look that after a while had me more laughing than actually caring as most of the time that "bewildered" look was out of place in the situation she was in. 
Oddly the 2013 TR version of Lara face has more appropriate emotion portrayal with the "bewildered" eye happening in the correct situation. 

I haven't tried the optional tombs and the famed "expedition" mode (that is the main reason why Rise has the most replay value of the 3 reboot TR) so i'll have a lot to do later, but so far i'm more curious on how they're going to end the story.

I started to play the last title of the serie "Shadow of the Tomb Raider" and noticed they changed again both Lara and "useless Jonah" face, but this time they did it for the better, Jonah looks actually like the original Jonah just a bit older (as it should as some years happened since the original reboot TR) and Lara facial expression does not have the "bewildered" eyes stare at every different emotion, in fact she has a lot more range of emotion and facial expression (and everytime appropriate to the moment) than even the 1st game.  They even managed to appropiately make her having the eyes look more tired after the years of adventuring.

After that the gameplay seems to have more work and importance on the stealth, that's very good, excepted in the last level i played that takes place is a huge tsunami and while super linear and filled with QTR was one of the most spectacular action level of the modern serie. 
Can't wait to see more, but so far the game is very good too.

[dragdeler]

I like the Lara from the third she looks warmer, less like a russian supermodel, but I find she acts warmer too.

I will admit the first manages to keep up a certain pressureand you can really enjoy killing the ennemies...in the third one the moral categories are less clear cut, the combat was less enjoyable, even in the end when she has her reasons to get more rampagey. Yeah get used to some scenes being overly bombastic in the third one, a few times I rolled my eyes... thoughthe fact that she apparantly goes through the whole first game with a puncture on the hip makes me cringe too. I like Jonah but I only know the one from the third so far ^^.

[Robsoie]

In the 1st reboot game, Lara's life is in a word : pain

[Akura]

American McGee's Alice: Madness Returns, a game that I haven't played in over four years and also has long since been removed from the Steam store, just got an update(on Steam). I haven't tried it but the comments on it seem to be that they removed the DRM requiring linking it to an EA/Origin account. Would be fantastic is that's the case.

[Robsoie]

Finally completed chapter 4 of Pathfinder : Kingmaker and my character is now the King

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

It was a very long journey to get there, packed with different adventures, in fact can't believe how much content there is in that game, truly an epic.
Definitively one of the best crpg i have played so far, and i still have 3 chapters to go !

(if only the coding wasn't that horribly crap with insane amount of loading windows to load even the tiniest locations, probably 20% of your gaming time in Pathfinder Kingmaker is spent in a loading window that's ridiculous)

found during my gaming time that there are really "must have" mods that fix several of the problems i had with that game
(the mods for this game requires you to download the Unity Mod Manager :
Cleaner , it adds a "Clean" button to the panels that popup when you leave an area, allowing you to definitively delete the more or less worhtless items that you left on the ground in the area (and there can be a lot) , as those items left behind can inflate the saved game, increasing save and load times.
No History , keeps an useless history file at 0kb instead of ever inflating in your saved games
Skip Intro , there are way too many loading through the game, so at least it make going to the main menu faster when you launch the game.
Inventory Tweaks , can't believe this has never been made default in the game through its development time, it allows you to have in your inventory stacks of the same items instead of separating exact same items (allowing you a lot less click to do during item management)
No Grain filter , there's some grainy filter in the game, maybe some people like it but i always find it simply ugly , this mod really improves the visual a lot.

[Robsoie]

Remnant from the Ashes, what i learned

- when you enter in an area of a specific world (dungeon/new map, anything you access through a door/loading time), the monsters are generated to your current gear score , they will stay at this level forever as long as you will not re-roll your campaign.
- gear score has nothing to do with what you have currently equipped, it has to do with some kind the best item you have in your inventory, meaning if by any chance you have all level 1 weaponry and armor equipped but in your inventory there's and helmet you leveled to 10 , you're in for a huge pain each time you'll enter a new area as monsters will be level 10 (monster level influence their health and their damage).
- adventure mode is generated the same as campaign : your gear score determine the level of the opposition.
But mid and world bosses have a minimum level set for them. Meaning if you don't level your items to at least their level, you're at a disadvantage when fighting them. In campaign a trick can be to fight them with your gear score on par with them (by example earth world boss with your gear score at 5) and if you really can't manage to beat them, upgrade your gear to get an advantage, but remember next new area you'll visit will be leveled to your new gear score.

Earth world boss : level 5
Rhom world boss : level 7
Corsus world boss : level 9
Yaesha world boss : level 12
note : the Undying King is level 14 in case you wish to fight him in Rhom, but for a first playthrough better help him instead

- there are many optional areas in a world, but a campaign will only generate a few of them , so everyone own campaign may not have the same areas/dungeons/boss/world boss in the same world.
- you can generate and switch to adventure mode at any time in your campaign (when next to a cristal) instead of re-rolling the campaign (that would reset it), adventure only generate 1 world (and may generated different areas/bosses than the ones you got from your campaign) , it's an excellent way to grind a bit (as it regenerate traits tomes) and to access areas/bosses you never had in your campaign in order to get specific loots/items/traits rewards you couldn't get in campaign, you can switch back to your campaign at any time too. And you can re-roll a new adventure at anytime.
- in case you're looking for a specific item/boss/area for your adventure, you have this tool that can analyze your save to see what your adventure has generated (so you can generate another one if you don't want to deal with what has been generated)
- some traits you gain/unlock from playing the game are very usefull (try your best to get the elder knowledge for increasing xp , more xp = more traits points coming) , do not neglect them as their bonus can really deliver and give you an edge in damage dealing/resistance
- love the weapon mods, love them they can make the difference between death and victory in many situations.
- weapon mod energy regenerate slowly with you shooting their weapons, but notice that it can also regenerate by itself if you use some of the ex-cultist armor that has mod regen ability built-in (even if you're a different class, just buy his armor on the shop) and make re-roll adventure on Earth until you finally can get the Spirit trait (max it) in case you didn't started the game as an ex-Cultist, just google to check which area you need to have generated in your adventure
- weapons obtained from boss material comes with a mod already applied, but unlike other weapon it can't be changed or removed
- boss weaponry is more powerfull than normal one so their level count double for the gear score, if you level a boss weapon to 5 , its actual gear score is 10 so be cautious, remember gear score is the level of your next area generate enemies.
- on the Rohm world there's a chance you may find an area with the Merchant, make sure to get in the correct position near his dog to have the interaction possible with the animal : you'll gain the dog as a weapon mod and he's awesome, easier companion to get than  the amazing 2 little gremlins (that requires to defeat an area boss that can be hard if the game decide to generate it "enchanted") that are my favorites or the 2 turrets that requires to beat 2 optional bosses.
- there are alternate way to kill some boss (and all world boss) , by example killing the Ent by breaking his leg first or not, providing a different reward in the end but be sure to check on google which reward is the most usefull for your playstyle.

[Iduno]

Genshin Impact is interesting. It's a very pretty world, with some interesting NPCs who you speak with once. Then, it becomes real obvious that the people who created the game and the people currently working on it aren't the same. I played for 7 months (the game is 13 months old now), and never got to the point where I was ready for the events they had for everyone. Well, everyone who had made it to end-game, they were pretty explicitly avoiding giving new players anything fun to do. I assume they're doing an experiment to see how long a terrible game can coast on the goodwill they gained at the start.

Edit: It's a combat-based game, balanced around people who have been playing longer than you have, have characters you can't get, and who have nothing to do in-game other than endlessly grind for better equipment. In general, the best equipment has a fraction of a percent chance of dropping, and less of a chance of having stats you want, and less of a chance of being upgraded the way you want. It has some good ideas in it, but they're mostly badly-implemented/buggy.

Remnant from the Ashes

That sounds a lot like the level scaling from IVAN, except IVAN's had a randomly-spawning high-level weapon that would disappear after you used it.

[Frumple]

IVAN was also, like... intentionally busted, iirc. If I'm not misremembering, at some point the original dev for it basically said straight out it's not really supposed to be winnable. It was, because it could get remarkably broken in some ways, but it wasn't supposed to be. Game was trying to kill you much more pointedly than most roguelikes of its time.

Think some of the later/branch development changed that somewhat, but in general if your difficulty/scaling is "like IVAN" there's decent odds you've done something wrong

[Robsoie]

Stupid difficulty or broken gameplay sounds exactly like one of the area optional boss i just went through in that Remnant game.

the boss area is a bunch of corridors and stairs leading to a few slightly more open rooms, in each of those rooms there's a generator you must destroy, each of them have a rather high amount of health so it takes a while to take one out.

But from the start a bunch of slow (though able of making a rushing attack for some reason) zombie-like enemies are coming and fighting then quickly those enemies are replaced by small and extremely fast enemies that can also teleport at will right on you, create electricity shockwaves when teleporting and their strikes are rather powerfull just because why not. 

This puzzled me a bit as even when summoning minions it was never enough to make a diversion (even the weed rattle as it is taken out too fast and it takes time to regen its mod power to summon another), i never had enough time to take out even a single of those generators because those idiotic teleporting super fast electro enemies were just tearing me apart if i started to aim at generators instead of them. 

Looking around i found the solution, and man what the hell : it's "don't look at walls"
Yeah, you need to enter the boss area while looking at your feet and move to each generators (that you can look at without problem) to destroy them without the enemies legions, because the insane opposition only spawn if you look at the walls.
Nowhere in the game there's a single hint about that kind of mechanics for that area. I really wonder how people figured that out.

[Il Palazzo]

Q:
Did anyone pick up GalCiv3 freebie on Epic? I see weird missing/garbled text in descriptions, and it says 'test branch' in the launcher. Don't see any obvious ways to get around it.

[Robsoie]

I don't use the epic launcher, i use legendary to download and launch the games i have on my epic store account, and when i list the games i own there with legendary i see 2 mentions of GalCiv 3 :

Code: [Select]

* Galactic Civilizations III (App name: 5f1c66366b2c4a6496d535d88c56e6cf | Version: 4.21.273666a)
 * Galactic Civilizations III (Test branch) (App name: 8931f79300d04c5889799bffc8ef70bd | Version: 4.21.273666a)
when i downloaded and played, it was the normal version, not the test branch (but it looks like both have the same version number, so maybe they're actually the same) and after creating a normal game (not campaign) quickly i don't see unreadable/missing text so far.

Try changing the resolution to see if by any chance the game engine is bugged with some of them ? (im playing with fullscreen enabled, not windowed in case it makes a difference)

[Il Palazzo]

Nah, that didn't work. Verifying the installation seems to have done the trick, though. Thanks for taking a look all the same.

[Folly]

Genshin Impact...In general, the best equipment has a fraction of a percent chance of dropping, and less of a chance of having stats you want, and less of a chance of being upgraded the way you want.

Dungeons can be run 8 times per day with the available free stamina, or 4 times with double rewards with the expenditure of some very easily farmable resources. Each run of the highest level dungeons(which are not hard, and can be done in multiplayer if you're struggling) yields 1 piece of top tier equipment, randomly selected from a pool of 10 pieces divided between 2 5-piece sets. Two of the equipment slots have fixed mainstats, so no RNG there. The other 3 slots have roughly 6 possible main stats each. You only need 4 pieces to get a full set bonus, so the 5th equipment slot can be from any set. I'm no mathimagician, but I think that's a bit better than a fraction of a percent.
It usually only takes me a few days to build a set with the main stats I want; a week or two if I decide to get ideal sub-stats also. The main stats are more than enough to do all basic content and events. Sub-stats are only needed for a few challenges, which yield no unique rewards and are mostly just for bragging rights.

The events page usually shows the latest stage of the main story, and one current event unrelated to the story.
The main story has been regularly updated since launch so it's pretty lengthy at this point, but there's no outstanding rewards for doing it as it's released, so no urgency there.
The other events do occasionally have challenging high level content; but more often than not they are scaled for any level, or not dependant on level at all. The current event is basically a pvp hide-and-seek game which anyone can easily participate in.

[Robsoie]

Some more notes about Remnant : From the Ashes.
As mentionned at first it seems there's no real interest in leveling your weapon and armor past gear score 14 (and that is in case you want to fight the Undying King) as after that every new area generated will be of your level.

But there's something enemies can't level up with : your traits .
Traits are what you want to grind the game and adventure mode (out of getting more items from areas/bosses that didn't generate in your campaign) as experience from kills (normal enemies and bosses) should really want to always increase, because higher level of traits (each trait can go up to level 20) will give you some very noticable edge over opponents that are of the same level as your gear score.

With unlocking more traits (defeating some opponents, dealing specific amount of damage, etc... unlock more of them) and increasing their level you may find that some areas that were hard for you on your early gear score will get more easier when in adventure mode despite the enemies will then have leveled to your superior gear score.
But all those bonus given by your traits will make you more powerful at equal gear score, and being percentage of extra stuff will get then better and better the more your equipment gear score is, making it then interesting to get gear score higher than 14.

Tough as long s you're not yet having some good traits at high level, gear score above 14 will not really give you a benefit.

So in Remnant, it's very important to grind adventure mode for both getting more traits and traits level, and additionally to unlock items, weapons and weapon mods that are awesome but didn't generate in your campaign.

And above gear score : level your equipped weapons and armor the same, as if you have a shotgun and a handgun both at level 12 and your armor at level 7 , all enemies you'll meet next will be level 12 and will deal damage that will be way above your pitifull level 7 armor (and in the game enemies can deal rather high damage to start with).
So better level your gear score slowly but equally between armor and weapons

[Iduno]

Dungeons can be run 8 times per day with the available free stamina, or 4 times with double rewards with the expenditure of some very easily farmable resources. Each run of the highest level dungeons(which are not hard, and can be done in multiplayer if you're struggling) yields 1 piece of top tier equipment, randomly selected from a pool of 10 pieces divided between 2 5-piece sets. Two of the equipment slots have fixed mainstats, so no RNG there. The other 3 slots have roughly 6 possible main stats each. You only need 4 pieces to get a full set bonus, so the 5th equipment slot can be from any set. I'm no mathimagician, but I think that's a bit better than a fraction of a percent.

Quick math for the most likely possible item would be 2/3 (getting a hydro item from the cryo dungeon, or similar) with 10% for the most likely stat. So about 6.7% chance assuming your mainstat is guaranteed (and those tend to be bad mainstats). 0.67% (2/3 of 1%) for the most likely possible artifact with no guaranteed mainstat, assuming each piece is equally likely. More likely you're looking at 1/3*5%*5%, or 0.083% or less, before upgrading the artifact, and that's including the assumption you got the piece you wanted (which is not guaranteed).

I don't know about the hide-and-seek event. I quit after the newest terrible combat one where my max-level characters couldn't survive the 4 events necessary to get the lowest-level rewards on the easiest difficulty, and the advice was mostly to use characters who haven't been available during the time I've been playing (over half of the time the game has existed).